Mark Hosenball, an investigative correspondent for Newsweek, is the only mainstream journalist that I could find on record who questioned Eid’s handling of this case. Yet not in the pages of Newsweek, in which Hosenball wrote a lengthy piece covering the arrests and only vaguely hinted at Eid’s unorthodox playing down of the threat, but during an obscure August 28 radio appearance on National Public Radio‘s Talk of the Nation.

Hosenball said at the time: “Well, in fact, the way it was explained to me was that merely uttering a threat against such an official is a federal crime,” adding, “I think if these people were from a different persuasion, or were of a different color, it’s arguable as to whether this might not have already been a giant sort of terrorism story with the Attorney General and the Homeland Security secretary out there, uh, you know, banging for blood.”

Seeing that “the mainstream press completely ignored Hosenball’s statement,” Jacobson also says that “so thorough was mainstream media’s obliviousness to his very newsworthy comments, they received no attention in alternative media and the blogosphere either, revealing how and why, even with the rise in influence of alternative media circles, mainstream news retains an ability to punt certain stories into a black hole.”